Joint Relay Selection and Relay Ordering for DF-Based Cooperative Relay Networks

Relay selection (RS) has widely been studied for both decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward (AF) protocols, and relay ordering (RO) was recently proposed for the AF protocol only . The two strategies, RS and RO, have been individually shown to be very effective to enhance the performance of cooperative relay networks. In this letter, we first discuss the fundamental difference of the two schemes and investigate an important tradeoff in terms of spectral efficiency and energy efficiency between RS and RO. Specifically, RS is more spectrally efficient, whereas RO can be more efficient in energy consumption. Then we demonstrate that indeed RS and RO generally have different outage performance and may complement each other depending on channel conditions. To optimize the outage performance, therefore, we combine the two strategies, RS and RO, and we propose joint RS-RO, followed by exact outage probability derivation of the joint RS-RO in closed-form. Finally, we obtain some interesting insights into the issue of selecting efficient transmission schemes between RS and RO.